Coastal Rewilding

As soon as the exams and marking were over members of the Centre for Aquatic Environments  travelled back down to the Gower Peninsular in South Wales for research field work.

For the previous two years Dr Heidi Burgess and Dr Jonathan Dale have been have taking hydrological, suspended sediment and bed elevation measurements from the Cwm Ivy marsh, a natural managed realignment site. This year Dr Niall Burnside, Dr Maureen Berg and PhD candidate Conor Strong added vegetation and aerial geomorphological survey expertise. This multi-disciplinary team will combine drone surveys (funded by NRW), vegetation (from NT Wales), sediment and hydrological data to build up an understanding of how this new intertidal wetland is forming and developing.

As climate is changing and sea level rising it is becoming increasingly unsustainable to hold the line of some coastal defences, as is the case at Cwm Ivy where the old sea wall was defending low quality farm land. Therefore land, which may have been historically reclaimed from the sea, is re-inundated by sea water creating new intertidal habitat. This ‘re-wilding’ and the formation of mud flats and saltmarsh has a range of benefits such as carbon capture, bird habitat, fish nursery grounds and reduction of energy from storm waves, to name but a few. However, humans do not really understand the details of the complex physical, chemical and biological interactions which occur during the transformation from terrestrial to inter-tidal environment. There is an urgent need to understand these fundamentals processes if we are to adapt our management of coastlines in the light of the climate emergency facing this planet.

For more information on Cwm Ivy see:https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/whiteford-and-north-gower/features/cwm-ivy-where-the-sea-comes-in

Niall and Maureen conducting one of the drone surveys